The Capitol Dome

Winter 2015-16

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30 elaborate one known in Greek architecture. Latrobe offered to marry it together with the cornice of the Roman Temple of Cas- tor and Pollux but Jefferson preferred the Roman modillion cor- nice so commonly used in American Georgian architecture of the eighteenth century. Latrobe justified this kind of synthesis because he believed the Greeks did not have the same rigid rules of the orders that Renaissance writers of treatises on architecture imposed on antiquity. "e Greeks knew of no such rules, but having established general proportions and laws of form and arrangement, all matters of detail were le to the talent and taste of individual architects." 26 Both the circumference and diameter of Latrobe's second House chamber were defined by the monumental columns, their Lysicrates capitals carved of Carrera marble on site in Italy by Giovanni Andrei, a sculptor who arrived in Washington in 1806 but was sent back to Italy in 1815. e choice of this order might have been because of the close association of all the choragic monuments—dedicated to individual singers—with the nature of Greek theater which was sung rather than recited. e House chamber's auditorium form was descended from ancient theaters and as a unique person Lysicrates was an appropriate choice to be remembered in this chamber whose occupants were directly elected by individual Americans. Latrobe decided to use the rich- ness of a colored proto-marble, Potomac breccia, for the column shas, a spectacular feature that mitigated the aesthetic loss of the one hundred skylights of his first House chamber. Once Corinthian was selected for the House chamber, Latrobe used the Tower of Winds order for the columns of both of the House's vestibules (fig. 14). British eighteenth-century scholars of Greek architecture considered the tower's order as intermediate between the Ionic and the Corinthian—the Attic order—and thus appropriate for these vestibules in close proxim- ity to the Corinthian House. e vestibule that connected the chamber to the rotunda is a circular tempietto. On the east side of the Tower of Winds vestibule there were two sets of columns. One set faced the vestibule while the second stands about three feet away on a window ledge set high on the wall that overlooked the adjacent dome lighting the ground floor vestibule. (See both the 1806 and 1817 plans, figs. 1 & 2.) e ground floor entrance vestibule to the south wing was more extensive and architecturally complex than the north wing's vestibule. Both legislators and visitors alike entered a rectangle the same size and shape as the corn vestibule but were led forward by light to cross the first vestibule and enter a two-story upended double cube inner vestibule. All of the inner vestibule's upper walls were decorated with two free-standing Tower of the Winds columns. ose on three sides stood in front of walls except those facing the window looking into the Tower of Winds tempietto outside the House chamber (fig. 15). e cupola of the inner vestibule's dome admitted abundant and concentrated light into this vertical space, the "Unity of Light" Latrobe favored. 27 No immediately apparent staircase led upward from the south ARCHITECT OF THE CAPITOL Fig. 16. Latrobe favored a "unity of light" to flood his second House chamber, his allegory linking the Enlightenment's new civic religion—liberty—to the House of Representatives. ARCHITECT OF THE CAPITOL

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